> *For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was be...

StrictDabbler · on July 13, 2023

I see this comment all the time on this topic used to justify any number of pricing inequities. It doesn't hold up here.

Yes. The US has a very widely distributed population. It has expensive internet and cellphone coverage.

Yes, Canada's population is quite dense. Basically everybody lives in ten(ish) cities near the border, plus Winnipeg. Yet it has fairly expensive internet and extremely expensive cellphone coverage.

There are still normally-priced cellphone plans in Vancouver, one of the densest cities in North America, that measure their phone plans in megabytes per month.

These two large first-world nations both have expensive coverage compared to other large nations despite having extremely different population distributions. The suggests distribution is not the cause of the expense.

Now both countries did allow oligopolies to form and control the market for data services and media and many of the richest people in each country are media moguls. Prices are kept just at the edge of affordability for the middle-class through an obviously collusive system of price-increase matching so uniform that you have to check the color of the brochure to tell which large provider has sent you junk mail.

But, you know. That probably has nothing to do with it.

torstenvl · on July 13, 2023

I think you must have accidentally responded to the wrong comment.

I didn't say anything about what I thought access or costs should be.

I said one thing and one thing only: the criticism in the OP is fallacious, in that it compares the overall sizes of the U.S. and Canada (which aren't relevant) instead of the size of the respective service areas (which are).

hulitu · on July 13, 2023

It is the same in some EU countries. Aparently is more cost efective to get internet in siberia than in Berlin.